Category: Technology

Oh, boy. Here we go again. Another day, another moral guardian pops up to condemn a game. Except, here, we’re not even talking about an actual game – just a trailer for one. I heard about this through a Google News alert, which brought me to this article on Forbes.

The blogosphere has tried the Hitman: Absolution trailer and it has been found guilty. In it, a group of female assassin’s dressed as hyper-sexualized nuns are brutally murdered by the ultra-masculine 47. It’s juvenile, brutal, an affirmation of every problem that video games have with women and an affirmation of the worst aspects of our culture.

I’ve never played Hitman – I saw the movie, which largely sucked, and think I spent a post-Thanksgiving sloth watching our son try to get through a mission.I seem to recall falling asleep, though that may have been as much the turkey overdose as the game. But, ooh! “An affirmation of the worst aspects of our culture”! I wanna see! Oh, dammit: I’m on my lunch-break. Better wait till I get home.

The news the other day that Amazon now sells more e-books than physical one didn’t come as a surprise. I got a Kindle for my birthday, and it has quite rejuvenated my reading habits. I’d slowly fallen away from the written page since moving to Arizona, in part because I was no longer commuting on the train to work and around town on public transport. That was a perfect opportunity for a book, also helping to ensure you never committed the ultimate faux-pas of making eye contact with your fellow travellers. But in Phoenix, the car is king, and it seemed terribly rude to ignore Chris and bury my nose in a tome on our way somewhere.

Also, let’s face it, my tired old eyes aren’t what they used to be, especially given the time since my last eye exam (I’m not saying it was a while ago, but the eye-chart started sphinx, ankh, sphinx, pyramid). They can focus at computer screen and TV set distance – just don’t expect them to switch with any degree of rapidity faster than a mid-80’s camcorder (and about as much grinding and whirring). Indeed, they also function about as well as said camcorder in low light conditions – and by “low”, I mean anywhere not appropriately lit for brain-surgery. Standard book text in standard conditions where I want to read e.g. our bedroom, is legible, but only with enough squinting to take the fun out of it.

End of the month time, so I checked the stats for the site, see how many people have been stumbling across my deathless prose – or, more likely, doing a Google Images search for dubious pictures [Hey, hits are hits, right?] Normally, there’s about 200-300 per day, not really varying too much. But then I looked at the graph for February…

If you use Google – and, let’s face it, who doesn’t – you’ll have noticed the new Google Instant feature. Previously, nothing would happen as you typed in your search terms, until you hit ‘Enter’. Then, you got the results. Now, if you have the feature enabled [and, personally, I’ve turned it off], as soon as you start typing, the rest of the page fills up with search results. So, if you were typing in “Trash City” say, here are the top results you get:

T – Target.com

Tr – Travelocity.com

Tra – Travelocity.com

Tras – The “Trash” entry on Wikipedia

Trash – The “Trash” entry on Wikipedia

Trash C – TrashCanCentral.com

Trash Ci – Ah, there we are! [Well, our bead store, anyway.]

However, there are quite a number of topics on which Google Instant Search refuses to express an opinion…

Curiously, a couple of days after our article on ethical piracy, we got a cease-and-desist letter from our Internet service provider, telling us that they had received a complain regarding copyrighted material being shared from our IP address. Hmmm… Coincidence? Or something more sinister!!!!?!?! Actually, no, I think it was just coincidence, as the files in question actually were our son’s responsibility. We had to have The Talk with him, expressing our severe disappointment that he had been busted; and, in particular, that it was for episodes of Eureka. Sheesh. I think we’d have preferred it to have been German scat porn.

Naturally, we are complying with our ISP’s request, because sharing copyrighted material is bad, m’kay? But, if we were still doing so, here are a few simple steps we would probably be taking, to avoid incurring the wrath of the entertainment industry.